Cuckoo (15 page)

‘Cor,' said Magda, admiringly. ‘You can't half run!' Ned twisted a buttercup through her hair. ‘Beautiful
and
clever,' he said.

They lay on the grass, still tangled together. Frances closed her eyes. The noise and glare slipped away and she was alone with Ned in an enchanted garden, running like Atalanta up Mount Parthenus. No, that was wrong. Atalanta lost her race; all the goddess gained was a suitor and three golden apples. Well, she had Ned and a plastic peg-bag as a prize. And a pair of cat-grey jeans.

‘Lucy has been claimed and is now happily reunited with her Granny in the tea tent. And if anyone else wants teas, I'm told there's a very good line in half-price sausage rolls …'

It was still warm, but the sun was nudging its way down the sky, looping long shadows across the grass. Frances opened her eyes, reluctantly. She didn't want anything to move or change, just to stay ideal and immobile like a picture in a Greek frieze.

‘Ned, I simply must go.' Her voice was a spoil-sport, detached from the rest of her.

‘What about the Dance Display? A hundred little Markovas pounding through
Swan Lake
. We can't miss it.'

‘But I daren't stay any longer. I've wasted the whole afternoon as it is.'

‘Wasted?'

‘I'm sorry, I didn't …' A Charles word, wasted. Charles would be back by now, wondering where they were, creaking into his father role, laboured and precarious.

‘My husband's coming home early, especially to see Magda.'

Magda bit into her half-price sausage roll. ‘I'd rather see the dancing.'

‘Magda!'

‘Tell you what, let's grab a beer and a hot dog, have a quick peek at the Nureyevs and then push off, OK?'

An obese and red-faced matron was pounding an old Bechstein. One swan had lost its feathers and another picked its nose throughout the
Danse Hongroise
.

‘You've got mustard on your chin,' Ned whispered, as he leant across and licked it off. ‘And the most incredible blue eyes I've ever seen.' He was murmuring in her ear. She could smell his warmth, his sweat.

‘Ned …'

‘What?'

‘Nothing.' How could she tell him she felt different and peculiar? He seemed to have hatched some new and hidden part of her which had lain dormant for so long, she'd almost forgotten it was there. It seemed stupid to swap this shabby, scuffed school-hall for her elegant house in Richmond. But again her voice rebelled.

‘Ned, I
must
go. Now. Don't argue.'

‘OK, love, relax. There's no hassle.'

They sauntered back to Richmond Station. Ned was taking the Broad Street line to Acton. Frances felt sick and strange. They'd stuffed themselves with junk food the whole afternoon, rolled about like gypsies on the grass. Tomorrow, it was back to normal, with regular mealtimes and perhaps a museum, so that Magda could be shown life in its true, grey, sober colours. She was leaping ahead of them, jumping over cracks in the pavement. Ned dropped back behind.

‘Don't forget, Fran, I'm around if you want me.' He stuffed a piece of paper in the pocket of her jeans. ‘That's my number. Phone any time. I'd like to help.'

‘Look, Ned, I don't really think …'

‘OK, please yourself.' He loped off towards the platform, the straw hat perched absurdly on his head.

‘Ned, that's Frances' hat!' Magda almost threw herself upon him, snatching the straw hat and confiscating it. They wrestled for a moment, then he hugged her – a casual but affectionate embrace. Frances watched with envy. So, a hug was as easy as that.

Magda dawdled slowly back to her, passed the hat across. There was a short, embarrassed silence.

‘Magda.'

‘Mmm?'

‘I think I'd better change.'

‘Change? But you're only a couple of minutes from the house.'

‘Yes, but Charles will probably be home by now, and he likes me, well you know …'

Magda shook her head. ‘No, I don't know.'

Frances disappeared into the station Ladies' room and re-emerged with her skirt on. It felt heavier and scratchier than she'd remembered it. It was also disgracefully creased from its sojourn in a plastic bag. She stuffed the hat at the bottom of the shopping basket, with the pink-pig plaster ashtray and the peg-bag.

They walked in silence back across the Green. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud, the colour seeping slowly out of everything – grass, sky, their own Cambridge-blue front door. Charles met them in the hall, his new paternal smile highly polished, wary. He was still in his pin-stripes and he too looked colourless. She could hear Stravinsky's
Orpheus
weeping from the drawing-room, the plaintive clarinets accusing her. How could she have endured Brent Edge punk all afternoon, when there were harmonies like this?

‘I was worried about you, Frances. I came home especially early, planned to take you and Magda out to dinner. I've booked a table at Valchera's.'

‘I'm sorry, darling, but I don't think we could manage it. We've been eating all afternoon.' A second Valchera's table swept away. Vichyssoise and crêpes suzettes dethroned by candy-floss and Dayville's. Her three-scoop Strawberry Fizz nudged her in the guts.

Magda was hiding behind her scowl again, had re-erected the barriers. Charles did his best to bring her out, his voice trampling on the
Orpheus
, frail, limpid music which couldn't fight with conversation. Frances listened anxiously as an ostinato screwed the room tighter and tighter in its relentless circling.

Charles turned to her instead, since he could get no word from Magda. ‘Pleasant afternoon?'

‘Very pleasant.'

‘Bought the clothes?'

‘Some.'

‘Why the black?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Well, it's a little funereal for a child, isn't it?'

‘She likes black.'

Silence. Black silence. ‘How was Oppenheimer?'

‘Fine.'

‘Would you like a chop for supper?' God I'm going to scream.

‘Thank you. Nice.'

Not nice. Not nice at all. Ridiculous. Unbearable. ‘I'll just have a salad. I'm not hungry. Magda?'

‘Yeah?'

‘A chop for you?'

‘Nope.'

‘Salad?'

‘Nope.'

‘No, thank you,' Charles said tersely. Frances winced. Christ, not again, she prayed, not the whole stiff, funereal, screaming farce again: Magda slouched at the table, fiddling with a fork, Charles chewing a pork chop, no talk except the odd strained monosyllables. She suddenly remembered Ned's scrappy piece of paper, stuffed in her jeans pocket. She'd forgotten all about it, hadn't even looked at it. It might have fallen out … ‘Excuse me a moment, would you?'

‘Of course.'

Always so damned civil, she and Charles. She rushed out to the hall, rummaged in the shopping bag, found the piece of paper still crumpled in the pocket. ‘Rilke is flattered you remembered him. His business phone number is 749 2348, extension Ned. P. S. Swap my ice cream cornet for your eyes.'

Crazy, puerile Ned, she thought, suppressing a broad grin. It wasn't even funny.

Charles washed his hands with the yellow scented soap in the marbled hotel basin. Five matching yellow towels in assorted sizes hung neatly on a heated rail. He pulled crossly at the smallest one, dried between his fingers. He hated hotels – too many bloody mirrors. The bathroom itself was like a mirrored coffin, reflecting him full length, in parallel. Six separate Charleses dried their hands; twelve hands replaced the towel, dead centre, on the rail; six double faces grimaced at themselves.

If he moved a fraction to the right, Laura edged into the mirror, reclining on the bed in the adjoining room, naked except for the fine silver necklet he had bought her.

‘Charlie.'

He wished she wouldn't talk – she was getting as tedious as Frances. And he'd told her a hundred times about the Charlies.

‘Charles …'

‘That's better …'

‘Come here, sweetest.'

‘Just a moment.' Christ! She couldn't want it again. He had a heavy afternoon ahead of him. One of Laura's attractions was that she was a short-and-sharp girl. None of that nonsense about multiple orgasms and the earth moving. Laura was more like a man – one big bang and all over. Though her face and figure were anything but masculine – thank God. He inched to the right again, eyed her in the mirror. She was a female you were proud to be seen with: voluptuous, fleshy, elegant; neither her auburn hair nor her scarlet talons quite what God had given her, but striking none the less.

And a sharp and witty woman who understood his work, respected him for being who he was.

He needed that respect, sometimes wondered whether Frances really fathomed the cruel pressures of his job. He could hardly afford to be a person any more. His profession had set him up as a deified decision-machine, cold, efficient, steely. His day existed only to solve other people's problems and survive other countries' crises; his evenings and weekends merely to keep up with the crippling burden of research. If a client quizzed him on custodial charges in Nauru, or Copper Futures on the Tokyo Exchange, he had to know – and instantly. And there were thirty-eight important clients, all pushing him for data. Multi-million banks and multi-national corporations picking his brains and probing his judgements; off-shore banana republics demanding instant fiscal programmes; oil princes expecting razzmatazz and homage with their ten-year economic plans. His own life was squeezed between them. Even a mistress had to be slotted into a lunch hour, and then paid for with half a night of homework. The same with music. If he listened to a concert on the radio, he had to make up lost time by swotting through the early hours. Sometimes he only snatched the last movement of the final piece, or taped the programme while he studied in another room, hoping to play it back in his car, or during meals.

Even in his sleep, strange jumbled images of dollar signs and silicon chips howled in the cold factory of his head; accusing columns of figures hurled themselves out of their tidy phalanxes and multiplied each other over and over, until their seething numbers spun into infinity. Some nights, he dared not sleep at all. One miscalculation could cost him half a million pounds and all his self-respect. Even in his so-called rest hours, he must remain constantly, relentlessly alert.

It wasn't easy. If he were irritable or tense, it was only because he had been forced to divide his mind into thirty-eight pieces and give each one simultaneous attention. That's why he needed a Laura in his life – a retreat, a haven, somewhere he could move out of the jangling computer of his mind, back to the solid base of his body, and remind himself it still existed.

It would be hellish, giving her up. True, she was already more demanding, and the ‘Charlies' were intolerable, but she was still a prized possession, something luxurious, unique, like his Bristol 411, and his eighteenth-century office with its Adam ceilings and its Goya aquatints.

He replaced his underpants, to rule out second helpings, returned slowly to the bedroom.

‘Lover …' Laura whispered.

‘Mmm?'

‘You don't really mean it, do you?'

‘Laura, I've got to mean it. I can't inflict any more on Frances at the moment.'

‘Frances doesn't know.'

‘She might get to know, darling, and I just can't take that risk. Not now. Not with Magda.'

‘So, I'm to be sacrificed for Magda?'

Charles kissed her heavy breasts. ‘It would have ended, anyway. These things always do.'

Laura pushed him off. ‘Don't be a bloody hypocrite! You had no intention of ending anything, until that godforsaken brat turned up. Look, I'm sorry, Charles, but …'

‘It's not for ever, sweetheart. It's just a break, that's all, until things are better organized. I've got plans for Magda. Boarding school, for instance.'

‘Frances won't agree to that. She's against boarding schools on principle, for girls. I've often argued with her over it. She thinks …'

‘She may think rather differently, when it's in her own interests.'

‘Charles, you're such a cynic. Just because your own principles are sandwiched between your interests, it doesn't mean that Frances' are as well.'

He removed Laura's groping fingers from his thigh. ‘I'm sorry, darling, but I've already written to the Sacred Heart at Westborough.'

‘A convent school? What a load of humbug, when you don't even believe in God.'

‘I'm not the one who's going.'

‘Well, is Magda religious?'

‘I can't say I've noticed. But her mother's Roman Catholic.'

‘Ah yes, I know the type – it's quite OK to screw, so long as you don't prevent the babies. I suppose that's how Magda arrived on the scene.'

‘No.'

Laura laughed, slid her hand down Charles' leg again. ‘Don't sulk, it doesn't suit you. Poor Frances – you knocked all the God out of her when she was a pious young thing carolling away in the church choir, and now you reinstate religion just to wrap your daughter in. She won't like it, Charles, you know. Frances agonizes over that sort of thing – indoctrination, freedom of choice. She's got quite a hefty conscience.'

Charles sat up on the bed. ‘You seem inordinately fond of Frances at the moment. I can't say I've noticed it before.'

‘Well, screwing your best friend's husband never does the friendship any good. Nor the screwing, really.'

‘So you're complaining about my performance, are you, now?' Charles eased up to his feet, drifted to the window and stared out at the garden spread below. Two spaniels were copulating underneath a willow tree. Bitches didn't criticize their dogs.

‘Oh Charlie, don't be so paranoid. You don't think I'd put up with you if you weren't a fantastic lover, do you? I've no complaints as far as bed's concerned. I just don't want to be turfed out of it.' Laura snaked her long legs farther down the covers, as if to stake her claim. ‘You always suit yourself, Charles. When
I
had scruples about Frances, you kissed them all away with a load of balls about self-fulfilment and post-Freudian morality. But now you're wrestling with your own guilts, they …'